The Role of the Peasant in Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine Anonymous College

One of the contradictions of radical movements is the way in which the movements both extol and denigrate the virtues of the working class. Orwell made this trope explicit in both Animal Farm with the fate of the horse brought to the glue factory at the behest of the corrupt pig officials and 1984 in which George Winston frequently remarks that the proles have not benefited from the revolution. Even as that protagonist wants to believe that the Big Brother regime will be overthrown by the proles, they disappoint him by fighting over trivialities. Ignazio Silone presents us with a similar tension between romanticism and denigration when he depicts the working class and peasant characters in Bread and Wine. This paper will explore the ways in which the hero Spina/Spada both romanticizes and denigrates peasants throughout the novel and how the narrative supports and subverts the protagonist’s viewpoint.

The novel begins in an extremely picturesque viewpoint of the countryside. “A young peasant woman with a baby in her arms, riding a small donkey, came down the provincial road, which was as stony and winding as the bed of a dried up stream. In a small field behind the cemetery a bare-headed old peasant was tracing brown lines with...